Donia Jarrar
Donia Jarrar is a composer, pianist and producer performing under the moniker Phonodelica. She is known for her unique use of field recordings, working with oral histories and their relationship to the composition and shaping of new musical works across varying genres. HIDDEN ASSEMBLAGES is the first album in a trilogy highlighting the different sides of the artist’s spirituality and sexuality as a Muslim woman, both light and dark. This work unpacks the isolation and trauma of Islamophobia in all its forms while critiquing the racism that plagues all Arab and Muslim communities and celebrating the Black-Palestinian solidarity movements.
Born to an Egyptian mother and Palestinian father, Jarrar grew up between Kuwait City, Alexandria, Ramallah and New York. Her personal experiences have strongly shaped her compositional voice, leading her to explore themes of intergenerational memory, trauma, identity, exile, displacement, and cultural narrative in conceptual albums. Jarrar was recently nominated for and awarded the Young Palestinian Artist of the Year (2021) by the AM Qattan Foundation. She was also awarded a Discovery Grant for Female Composers from the National Opera Center of America for her work Seamstress, a documentary multimedia opera based on oral history interviews conducted with Palestinian women from her community. She has been commissioned by the Doris Duke Foundation for Islamic Art and is a featured musician on the Emmy-award winning series Arab American Stories. Jarrar holds a Doctor of Musical Arts degree from the University of Michigan. She is based in Los Angeles.